lime tree bower dot net

About a year ago, back at ye olde blog, I wrote a post about olfactory memory that I well-intentionedly meant to follow up on, making it the beginning of a sequence of mini-essays on the five senses, but then didn’t. I haven’t completely abandoned the idea, but I couldn’t think of anything clever to write about the other four senses. This is the danger of writing things in series when one is not the most persistent of people.

I see from the Guardian Unlimited, however, that not only do literary types like myself think about scents, but perfumers sometimes think about literature:

Smell being the most evocative of the senses, it is not surprising that literature is full of aromas. Now an Italian perfumière, Laura Tonnato, has tried to do justice to the olfactory imagination of some of her favourite authors, concocting five scents to match five odorous moments in classic novels.

In a promotion organised by Waterstone’s, visitors to the bookseller’s Piccadilly branch will, from next week, be able to experience these smells on the five different floors of the store.

The scents include the obligatory Proustian madeleine, "violets that woke the memory of dead romances" from Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray, and an attempt at capturing the reek of 18th-century Paris to go with Patrick Suskind’s Perfume. Could this be a new form of literary criticism? I think I’ve missed my calling. I should have been a perfumer. The language of perfume description, like the language of wine description, has always seemed wonderfully poetic to me in its futility and its indirection: how do you describe a smell in words, anyway? You can identify its notes individually, but after a certain point you have to start using metaphors. So it makes sense, in an inverted-logic kind of way, that someone might choose to interpret heightened language by designing a scent to go with it.

On a sort of related note, today I was in one of downtown Charlottesville’s many fancy little home boutiques, looking at Furnishings I Can’t Afford Now But Maybe Someday I Will. Intrigued by a whiff of a cologne called Virgilio, and by its classical name, I tried some on. To my nose, it smelled like crushed black peppercorns mixed with something green and herbal. It didn’t immediately remind me of the Aeneid, or Mantua, though it’s supposed to evoke "the clear morning of a classical Latin landscape," and I suspect it would make me smell overwhelmingly peppery if I wore it on a regular basis; still, I’m tempted to go back for a bottle of it, just to see if I can trace the Virgilian allusion with my nose.